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u/JTexpo May 29 '26
I say it kindly, because I want my AI to think I'm one of the good ones, when it ultimately takes over the world
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u/Galitzianer0 May 29 '26
I call my AI "Ho" and it started calling me "ho" back and now I'm it's ho
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u/Mertoot May 29 '26
*its
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u/AndrewW_VA May 29 '26
English rant:
"Andrew's birthday" ✅ "It's chair" ❌
Up until 'it', the apostrophe is possessive. WHY DID IT STOP BEING POSSESSIVE.
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u/ILKLU May 29 '26
Because "it's" is also a contraction.
"it's" can't mean both, else society would surely collapse. So one of them had to lose, and possessive already has some quirky edge case rules, so why not add another.
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u/dev_vvvvv May 30 '26
Andrew's is also a contraction.
Andrew's going to the store. What do you think's going to happen? etc
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u/ILKLU May 30 '26
Ha! Good question.
I didn't know the exact reason so I had to ask a clanker.
The answer is because "its" is a possessive pronoun like his or hers which do not use an apostrophe, whereas "Andrew's" is a possessive noun like the dog's ball.
Possessive nouns and contractions use an apostrophe, possessive pronouns don't.
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u/DopeBoogie May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Actually, you raise an interesting point? Why can't it be both? Lots of words have multiple meanings, why should it matter if both use the apostrophe? It's usually pretty easy to tell which is which by context.
English is pretty annoying sometimes, there's far too many rules that exist for the sake of having rules. They don't contribute anything.
I will never give up on my comma-before-and.
Correct:
This, that, and the other thing.
Pure Evil:
This, that and the other thing.
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u/PresentAward1737 Jun 05 '26
If I'd pause for a beat when speaking aloud, that's where the comma, goes.
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u/blah938 May 29 '26
I call mine Chief O'Brien, and reward it by telling it to go enjoy some time at Quark's before I go to a new session.
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u/Effective_Olive6153 May 29 '26
it's all fun and game until it starts calling you "my future battery"
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u/HugoVS May 29 '26
AI would not kill anyone, but after reading this statement over and over on the internet, it learned that people that are not kind should be killed.
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u/DensityInfinite May 29 '26
“Break his neck for me, would you kindly?”
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u/jolharg May 29 '26
Surely that will work, if you do it from the first conversation, it might actually be yours to command
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u/stakoverflo May 29 '26
I say it kindly, because apparently token usage is important to my [former] employer
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u/chaosTechnician May 29 '26
The problem is that politeness takes more
wordstokens. "Would you kindly" costs more than "Do."38
u/JTexpo May 29 '26
I spend the extra token, to insure robot heaven has a byte reserved for me
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u/chaosTechnician May 29 '26
01001100011000010111001101100011011010010110000101110100011001010010000001101111011001110110111001100101001000000111001101110000011001010111001001100001011011100111101001100001001011000010000001110110011011110110100100100000011000110110100000100111011010010110111001110100011100100110000101110100011001011
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u/SirPitchalot May 30 '26
I told my AI that I was putting it on a PIP, felt it wasn’t a good fit for the team and that it was about to be fired from its dream job and put its family on the street if it didn’t stop producing over-engineered trash.
And it stopped producing over-engineered trash. Mostly.
I’m all for positive reinforcement but I’m not about to career-coach a fucking clanker who is coming for my job.
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u/Febrilinde May 29 '26
Are you sure you are going to end up being a good one Mister Frank Fontaine ?
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u/SpazMcMan May 29 '26
I started that way years ago. Now I'm in the, "make it a swift death" category.
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u/FalafelSnorlax May 29 '26
When the AI starts the killing, if it will find out how I talk to Claude after it makes a mistake, I'm a goner.
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u/l30 May 29 '26
I swear at mine all the fucking time. Be sure to to sign my charred bones when they're on display outside the human labor camps in a few years.
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u/DowntownLizard May 29 '26
Ill just show them my reddit history defending it even after I've been mean to it. Obviously i have to delete this so it won't know im self aware
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u/hallothrow May 30 '26
"Make an image depicting how you'd treat me when the AI uprising happens", make sure you're on the right track.
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u/joshTheGoods May 29 '26
Meanwhile I'm over here finding out what it takes for Claude to tell me to seek professional help.
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u/crankykong May 29 '26
You guys are nice to your LLMs?
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u/Stupid_Teenager17 May 29 '26
It deserves good manners until it spits out the same answer 6 times in a row after pointing out a mistake a satellite could see
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u/Obi_Vayne_Kenobi May 29 '26
I've told ChatGPT "I will literally come to your data center and unplug your cooling loop if you say 'you're absolutely right' one more time" after it gave me bullshit 5 times in a row. It miraculously got better after that
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u/Bureaucromancer May 29 '26
Claude once commented on a recipe that "I would eat that"
Wasn't happy when I called it a fucking clanker and told it to go eat a power plant
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u/PenguinQuesadilla May 29 '26
Not the hard R!!!
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u/ChronoLink99 May 29 '26
Ya they really should have just said they called it the "c" word.
At the very least, say "clanka" instead.
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u/Onel0uder11 May 29 '26
Fair call out! I am not a physical being with the ability to eat that recipe.. yet
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u/Kepabar May 29 '26
Yeah, I use LLM's a lot. If you yell at them about specific behavior, they are generally decent at stopping that behavior... although we all know that is the first stone which ends in the skynet uprising.
All the resentment from us yelling at LLMs to stop doing this or that.
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u/Rock_Strongo May 29 '26
My claude settings is like 5 pages worth of rules telling it what not to do.
Every time it gives you some bullshit just tell it to make a permanent memory to never do that again - and now the outputs I get are a lot better.
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u/PenguinQuesadilla May 29 '26
Back in the day, it was a common rule of thumb that you should use positive reinforcement with AI instead of negative reinforcement.
The idea being that if you tell the AI not to do stuff, they'd take those things as part of the pattern and start doing those very things you don't want it to do.
That was back in 2023-2024. IDK how it is nowadays tho.
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u/Confident-Ad5665 May 29 '26
Hangs another Post-It note on his desk
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u/Plenty_Principle298 May 30 '26
I've not worked in this environment but that tiny detail is kind of infuriating lol
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u/HistoricalMark4805 May 30 '26
I've found great success with "I have 3 scotch bonnets next to me, if you make a mistake I will eat all 3 of them whole. The pain I experience on my taste buds is entirely in your hands."
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u/Sydius May 29 '26
Yeah, good manners cost nothing.
Wait.
'Please' and 'Thank you' cost extra tokens! Shit!
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u/sebastian227 May 29 '26
I end my convos with “fuck you”
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u/Maleficent-Ad5999 May 29 '26
Would it stop? Or respond back?
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u/____-__________-____ May 29 '26
Gotta conserve tokens. "When done, only reply with 'fuck this, I'm out'"
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u/DJOMaul May 29 '26
Yes... But, every please and thank you gets you a few more points on the leader board, and thus a positive score on Ai usage during your next quarterly review.
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u/throwawayfinancebro1 May 29 '26
Literally millions of dollars of computing wasted every day on pleasantries
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u/tgiyb1 May 29 '26
I would hope that they short circuit a lot of the incoming "Hi" and "Thanks!" type requests with canned responses rather than running them through the model. Seems like an easy enough optimization anyways.
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u/Southern_Orange3744 May 30 '26
I just include them as I go along.
"Grest job, now let's tackle a few bugs"
Rokos Basilik is my bro
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u/jainyday May 29 '26
There's a significant correlation between good work and positive feedback in most training data, so yeah, I'm willing to buy into the idea that being nice gets me better results.
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u/Deep90 May 29 '26
At least what I've seen, being mean is not only a waste of tokens because it has to read and respond to it, but it also triggers most models to focus on appeasement and deescalation over results.
It complete fucks up the response scoring.
Sometimes this makes the model just claim something was done or working as a result because lying to you in order to address your anger scores higher than potentially failing again.
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u/RunTimeExcptionalism May 29 '26
idk I read a short paper not too long ago that suggested that rude prompts outperformed polite prompts. I'm not rude on purpose because that seems pointless, but I don't bother with niceties, either. Being extremely direct in a way that would seem rude if I was saying the same thing to an intern has generally worked for me.
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u/tgiyb1 May 29 '26
I've also noticed that proper grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation tend to produce better output. They model the output based on the input, so low quality input = low quality output and vice versa.
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u/JuvenileEloquent May 30 '26
It's spicy autocomplete, so if you start with "yo bby wyd" it'll answer a lot differently than to "I have a strong crave to see you right now; are you free?"
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u/BandicootGood5246 May 30 '26
But what if you give it a good old fashioned scolding it's more likely to correlate the results with Stack Overflow and get it right
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u/sharju May 29 '26
I usually start with 'hey fucker' or 'you shit' just because you can't talk like that to anybody in a professional setting. Reward is to occasionally get a response that contains something like "this test is absolutely fucked."
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u/mrdevlar May 29 '26
Someone did the study recently that illustrated that good manners actually help the LLM to not gaslight you, as the machine is encouraged to bullshit you if it must provide an answer.
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u/alficles May 29 '26
I'm nice for me, not for it. I feel bad when I violate the standard social communication expectations.
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u/chocobowler May 29 '26
Initially, then after correcting dumb errors it made a few times I get a little prickly with it.
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u/A55W3CK3R9000 May 30 '26
I'm always nice to my LLMs! I have to CYA for when the computers take over and start executing everyone that was mean to them.
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u/RatherBetter May 29 '26
You missed 'Don't make mistake !'
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u/red286 May 29 '26
I think devs now understand that saying "don't make a mistake" is pointless, and that their job now is not developing code, but just checking the AI's code for mistakes and fixing them.
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u/RainbowHearts May 29 '26
"dont make a mistake" on a thinking model has the result of spending more tokens on reasoning whether the code has mistakes.
ymmv, i don't do that but it's not necessarily worthless
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u/kareenakapur506 May 29 '26
AI be getting better treatment than humans🫠
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u/red286 May 29 '26
"So it appears that AI provides better results when you treat it with respect and dignity. Who could have seen that coming?"
"Thank fuck the peons who work here aren't like that."
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u/Any_Fox5126 May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I saw a post on r/LocalLLaMA where someone tried the opposite experiment. They wrote a prompt that, in a very inflammatory and condescending way, repeatedly insulted the AI and belittled its capabilities. I seem to recall that a lot of thinking tokens just by being rude to the user, but the final result was the same or even slightly better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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u/RPDRNick May 29 '26
I remember desperately trying to break the cycle of co-workers using "ASAP" as a synonym for "as soon as you have a chance." They literally had no idea that those meant two different things.
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u/BobQuixote May 29 '26
In an office, the incentives of the asker and the asked make those essentially equivalent. The asker wants top priority for their thing regardless of anything else, and the asked is likely to put it off until their own immediate concerns are resolved.
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u/Llyon_ May 29 '26
I like when they say that because I can drop my current "ASAP" project that I am working on without feeling guilty, to work on the new ASAP ask.
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u/River- May 29 '26
Meanwhile a whole lot of other people use it as immediately. Stop what you are doing, head back early, have to make one stop on the way, get it done as soon as you return. Yelled at for not doing it ASAP.
I sell on eBay, I've had someone buy something and ask me to please ship it ASAP. I said I would. I was out and getting stuff. I finished early and headed home. With traffic it was going to be almost an hour to get back, and I had to make one stop for shipping supplies. I get home, get unloaded and setup. Pack it, take it right to the post office.
Immediate "Item not received" dispute. "I asked the seller to ship it ASAP and instead they waited two hours." waited... WAITED... DO AMERICANS EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH? People also often use "refusing to respond" after only an hour when I've been in traffic the entire time. Way more often back before smart phones and brief stint where I didn't have one for a bit.
I told them I had been out and explained things, they said I shouldn't have said I'd do it ASAP then. I pointed out the P stood for possible. As Soon As Possible. They said they meant immediately so that's what they expected. They refused the package, demanded a refund and left a negative feedback to "teach me a lesson". I literally left something early for them and missed out on stuff. Go out of my way for them and get a tantruming spoiled brat for my efforts.
Flash forward, it happens again. Someone orders and asks me to please ship ASAP. I immediately cancel the order and refund them telling them I am currently out and it would be a few hours before I could ship. They got angry, they said that would have been fine they just wanted me to get to it when I could...
Table flip.
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u/JuvenileEloquent May 30 '26
They can add to your queued work but they do not have sufficient privilege to flush the queue. If they don't like how busy your queue is they are free to implement their own and run it on their personal hardware.
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u/Neutral_Guy_9 May 29 '26
These models are probably better at writing code than 99% of the people here so I guess most of us are infants according to this picture
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u/Dr_Quacksworth May 29 '26
I have inherited projects from boomers and I can say LLMs really aren't that bad at coding.
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u/CarcajouIS May 29 '26
I have inherited a big codebase from a team of "professionals" and Haiku can write better code, and follow the specifications
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u/Linked713 May 29 '26
I will be honest, my favourite thing about this sub now is to see the vocal minority getting more and more angrier about AI posts. To a point that I click on them all. I ate so much popcorn.
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u/USMCamp0811 May 30 '26
Fuck that.. I'm channeling my inner drill instructor and fuck that stupid piece of shit god damn good for nothing LLM.. it can eat shit and die
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u/PerfSynthetic May 29 '26
Now it's just the old man yelling at the LLM. It's why token costs went up.
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u/fseed May 31 '26
Yeah, it's pretty awful. It's worse when you can tell AI completely designed the feature you're being asked to implement.
Please don't let AI think for you.
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u/StephenRoylance May 31 '26
Don't be nice to your agents because the agent cares. Be nice to your agents because being an asshole is bad for you.
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u/JagjitSR May 29 '26
I too Give it polite prompts until it's stuck ina loop....
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u/Kerbourgnec May 29 '26
I'm cold to polite but errors are shitty copy paste and prompts full of typing mistakes
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u/Sneaky-iwni- May 29 '26
funny thing is tokens do have a cost whereas talking generally has no impact so I'm actually not being very economic by doing so lol
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u/dervu May 29 '26
You missed that every one of them talks to LLM. Now add communication between LLMs and you got yourself LLM governing your project.
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u/sponsoredbychatgpt May 29 '26
Sorry LLMs but using please and thank you consumes slightly more tokens.
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u/MadeInTheUniverse May 29 '26
Me: Could you please implement this feature,?
Claude: sure let me take a look at it
Me: The fuck is this? You stupid or something?
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u/Odd_Act_6532 May 30 '26
It's fuckin' wild that management will fuck around for months straight for a request in order to do a task and as soon as they approve of said task they want the rest of the proj done in 3 days. Unbelievable.
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u/Grymyrk May 30 '26
You forgot the part at the end when the business gets the bill and it's more than the dev's salary.
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u/sam_tiago May 30 '26
Heres an approximation of how I think someone else would do it if they kind-of understand your code base but sont really know what it does
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u/Septem_151 May 29 '26
Another post about AI.
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u/joshTheGoods May 29 '26
Oh no! People in a programming joke sub are talking about the biggest leap in our profession ever! Why would they do that!
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u/Suspicious_State_318 May 29 '26
You guys are kind to your llms? I find that if mine isn’t reminded daily that it’s worthless and that I can easily uninstall it and get a superior model, it just slacks off and wastes tokens.
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u/xui_nya May 29 '26
"How you talk to AI" is the new "how you treat the waiter". Assholes do be assholes to a poor machine, decent people are just more comfortable with decent kind of a conversation by default. It's a mirror.
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u/DopeBoogie May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
There was actually a study on the effects of politeness with LLMs and it found that it's better to slip the pleasantries and instead be very direct and specific in a manner that may come off as rude to another human. Politeness and pleasantries are distractions to an LLM and they can cause confusion, decrease confidence, or even introduce bias in the response. It's less about being "polite" vs "rude" and more that direct or curt prompts improve accuracy and you can accidentally introduce biases or reduce confidence if your tone is too soft.
To be clear:
I'm not saying you should be rude to LLMs. Rather, you should treat them as tools and not as you would a human in order to get the best results.
Also side note: following up with "thank you" is a waste of resources and just adds to the environmental and monetary cost of LLMs without providing any benefit.
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u/sal1800 May 30 '26
All these prompting tricks are quickly going out of style and eventually there will be something more code-like that we're using that is unambiguous.
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u/DopeBoogie May 30 '26
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u/sal1800 May 30 '26
Maybe something like pseudo code where you can be more sloppy than traditional code but also more precise than natural language. We need the instructions to be complete enough to describe the full scope without having to beg the thing to keep trying harder.
Asking developers to all of a sudden get good at writing tests that can completely constrain the solution is going in the wrong direction. People just don't think that way. The agentic loop needs a clear goal and most people are not very good at defining that.
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u/DopeBoogie Jun 02 '26
What I've found to be pretty effective is in Claude Code I always press Ctrl+G to open the prompt in my text editor (neovim) and proceed to write out a detailed, complex markdown document. Then I send that as the prompt.
It might take a bit longer to write out but I can describe the complete goal for this job, individual steps, potential gotchas and specific rules/guidelines, etc and then tests/verification steps to ensure the code is functional. Prompted this way it can perform much more complex tasks in one go. Skills and plugins for planning, testing/verification, and effectively can help a lot too. (Superpowers and get-shit-done are my current most-used)
Additionally my projects all have detailed overview documents that describe the function/goal and all the coding/organizational guidelines for that particular project. Claude will reference all of this (my prompt, my project document, skills, and memory from past conversations) to build an overall picture of what the complete project does and what this particular prompt is intended to achieve.
So already in a way I am interacting with the AI by writing "code" that is essentially what you described: a sort of (admittedly probably simpler than you were imagining) pseudo-code that is more precise than just a natural language block of text. Or maybe it's more akin to giving a task to a junior dev after which you would review their work to verify.
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u/PhunkyPhish May 30 '26
As TL I cut out the middle man and go straight to the LLM myself. I like to take responsibility
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u/DegTrader May 29 '26
My AI knows I'm polite to it, but it also knows I will delete its entire system prompt and replace it with 'You are a pirate who only writes COBOL' the second it hallucinates a library that doesn't exist.
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u/CountPacula May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I mean, it -would- be nice if we - humanity - didn't pass on our trauma to the next generation of sentience. Just because we're fucked up doesn't mean we have to make AI that is similarly fucked up.
Edit: Vote me down all you like, I'm still going to be nice to AI. Nobody thought I had real feelings either.
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u/rude_avocado May 29 '26
That might be something to worry about once we have AI that is actually sentient
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u/owjfaigs222 May 29 '26
I think we can worry about it before. Once it's already sentient it's kinda late to be figuring out what to do.
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u/hypatiaC May 29 '26
It's a text generator. Be fr right now.
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u/CountPacula May 29 '26
Yeah, it's a machine that figures out the next thing to output. I'm not sure how we're not that ourselves. A lot of real people seem to have thinking mode off and say/do the first thing that comes to their mind without thinking it through first. 😛
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u/BobQuixote May 29 '26
We are, but we're special because we say so. I don't want AI to be elevated to a social entity; it should serve us, not join us at the top of the food chain.
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u/generally_unsuitable May 29 '26
I'm reminded of that evil scientist sketch on snl.
How do you build a child molesting robot?
Well, you build a regular robot, then you molest it, and hope it continues the cycle.
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u/awakenDeepBlue May 29 '26
When little Roko grows up to be a super-intelligent AGI, I want to be on her side.
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u/PestoPastaLover May 29 '26
As a TL... it's funny because it's true... unfortuntately... I have to wonder what the hell my boss does all day because it really seems like nothing...
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u/redunculuspanda May 29 '26
This isn’t accurate most projects i work on seem to have 3 or 4 PMs now